Find out what it’s like to live in a totalitarian surveillance state with this week’s Epic Free Game.
How would you act in a dystopia of surveillance and oppression? This is the question behind Beholder, the game that you can get for free this week from the Epic Game Store and that turns you into a cog in a totalitarian system.
(Click here to go to Beholder on the Epic Games Store)
Free on Epic: Beholder
(Genre: Adventure – Developer: Warm Lamp Games – Release: November 09, 2016)
Bei Beholder is a 2D adventure with some strategic elements. In addition, the game often presents you with decisions that influence the further course of the game.
You take on the role of Carl Steyn, who moves into a public housing complex with his family to work as a caretaker. However, it quickly becomes clear that you are supposed to do more than just maintain the building.
The ruling regime wants you to spy on the residents and even turn them over to the police if they violate state laws. To monitor your tenants, you install bugs, search through their belongings, and create profiles about them.
What you do with this information is left to your own moral compass.Do you turn in your neighbors and prove your loyalty, or do you keep the violations to yourself and save them from the police?
However, you are constantly short of money and have to pay bills or send your son to university. You can also use your acquired knowledge to blackmail your neighbors, for example.
So you are always stuck between your obligations to the state, the needs of your tenants and the problems of your family, and you have to decide which path to take.
On Steamthe game is a real hit, with91 percent positiveratings – based on more than 19,000 reviews – users celebrate the dystopia in the style of George Orwell’s 1984.
This is how you get Beholder for free
To do that, go to the Beholder store page on the Epic Games Store and add the game to your library for free. Note that you have until November 28, 2024 at 5:00 p.m. to do so. However, the Blissful Sleep DLC is not available on Epic. Since your decisions can lead to different endings, it may be worth playing the main game multiple times.
